Interesting concept, but 100 words is really quite a lot to get through... It's tiresome trudging through the easy words at the start, and I never got to see the interesting words before getting bored.
I've seen other systems like this calibrate far more quickly by assigning a sort of score and confidence behind the scenes. Confidence starts out low and increases over time - correct/incorrect answers rapidly adjust score at the beginning, then things settle down.
In practice this means you get a sequence of increasingly uncommon words initially, until you get one wrong, then you drop back to something easier until you start getting things right again, and eventually circle around words at your level.
Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick (or add an undo button).
> Also - too many clicks per word. It's low stakes, just let me click the definition once and I'll live if I misclick.
This, and accept that people will have incorrect input and build it into the confidence. Even the smartest person in the world sometimes makes clerical errors, or has the wrong neuron fire at the wrong moment.
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Moly holy the clicking is too much 3 clicks that could be one :O
300* that could be 100*
Even better if keyboard keys (1,2,3,4) were also supported.
+1 to all these points especially the first one. I dropped off after about 10 words and didn't have a clear path to move to the next level.
It also doesn't get hard enough. Also way too many of the words are just words about long words, or the tendency to be verbose.
Level 5 grandmaster was hardcore!
I got zeitgeist, panacea and obfuscate on Level 5... wut?
Some at Level 4 was definitely a lot more obscure than those.
How jejune of you.
It does get hard enough but only in the very last fraction.
Zenzizenzizenzic for example.
If I had to write out the definition, I’d have been screwed. The recursive structure of the word makes it out as a child’s word or something from mathematics. Given where it is in the game, that left one answer out of the four.
It gets impossible. Yarborough is apparently not a town in England. I guess technically it's a village but come on...
> It also doesn't get hard enough
Oh come on! Like you really knew what "Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia" is?
I thought that one was pretty well known. But then, I can also rattle off Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch at will.
But why?
say what you like about antidisestablishmentarianism; at least it's an ethos
Somebody obviously coined the word as a self-referential joke. And somehow it stuck. That makes it memorable.
Speaking of things that stick... arachibutyrophobia is the feat of getting peanut putter stuck to the roof of your mouth. (I admit I had to look that one up, as it's not nearly as memorable, though I knew the word existed).
They are Welsh?
I too can say it and I'm very English...ish. LlanPG is a tourist attraction and a great example of an amateur advertising idea smashing it!
That's round 2 of England's established church problems. Not as bad as round 1, where the Catholic church was violently disestablished by Henry VIII so he could divorce his wife. Cromwell told the Catholics they could go "to hell or to Carna". I've been to Carna. It's bleak.
It's hard to disestablish a religion. Too many people believe. In Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church came back after Communism went down. Now Putin uses it to reinforce his rule.
> so he could divorce his wife
That’s the schoolyard version of the story. In reality dissatisfaction with the church hierarchy had been simmering for some time, both in England and in Europe. Henry wouldn’t have gotten away with the split if it hadn’t enjoyed widespread support from the general public, the political class and the aristocracy.
The real question is, do you know what it means?
:D I did better than expected, but I did miss that one. I learned some fun ones.
Based on only missing that one, it figured out. I knew 83,000 words. That seems unsupportable
Lol. Yeah. Non native here but gave up at about 50 words. Too many words, too easy. And my English SUCKS
If you gave up at 50, that means you skipped the difficult words.
True. I tried a few more times. There is just so much wrong with the design. First 90 words super easy and then super hard? Why not random? Why is the longest description the correct one? Why so many? Why 3 clicks?
Agree. Complexity for me skyrocketed towards the end
Yes - a very marked step rather than a gradual increase, I thought.
Plus a scroll on mobile because the submit button is below the fold, though it seems to stay in the right place after the first scroll.
Vibe coders don't know 'bout my dvh.
> Also - too many clicks per word.
They’re also too far away. I’m on a laptop and I have to keep moving the cursor up and down just to confirm. Give each option a letter or number and let me press it to choose the answer¹.
¹ There is (was?) some service for forms which does that and it works quite well. I think it was Typeform, but I just opened the website to check and—of course—it’s now just plastered with mentions of AI so I lost interest in verifying.
it's intentional. therefore testing vocab isn't the point.
I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments
> it's intentional.
What is?
> I'm guessing it's testing our susceptibility to machine-generated compliments
I fail to see the point. For one, the compliments aren’t particularly good or interesting; for another, I didn’t even read them (I just went back to check after your comment), I simply clicked when seeing green.
too many clicks per word. and the distance between click points. that's intentional.
well the point would be to see how susceptible you are to that. They're figuring out where your cost vs reward tipping point is.
Can you elaborate? Who are the imagined "they", and in what way are they conducting experiments with or monetizing this investigation?
some people will crawl a mile for a promise. some people get skinny on a diet of promises
I think you’re reading too much into it. I think it’s just a common design pattern that was copied and is clearly optimised for mobile, where the distance doesn’t matter that much.
Anyway, if they were running metrics on that they just became useless because I automated responding to it a bunch of times.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48598586#48600403
There's a small handful, mostly QI-inspired.
100 is too many? Thats two or three minutes at most.
I would suggest a bias in this test towards reading. More than a couple are words i know but rarely see in print. But maybe im too much a fan of british TV so i hear many of thier words without seeing them written down.
Did you actually do 100 words? It wasn't two or three minutes. With good UX, sure. But I wasn't getting through 1 word per second.
I did. Missed two. If you know a word there is no thinking time. Im on tablet so i was probably fast on the clicking, but not like korean gamer fast.
I don't know, I read each option for the first 20 or 30 in case there were any trick questions. There were a couple later where 1 option was very close to the meaning and 1 was much better. I actually got one wrong (can't remember what now, shame there's no summary at the end) where I chose one and it said another answer was correct, but I knew the meaning I chose was also valid.
I guess you just have a higher tolerance for inconvenience than me
yeah, it should just be click->next;
I got tired after 8 words, looked at how many I'm suppose to know and gave up.
It'd be improved with statistical analysis; just progressively get harder and try to guess. If you wanted to gameify, you could update the stats after each answer.
Also the explanations are too broad.
F.e. Frugal - Economical with money or goods
I don’t think frugal means economical it means rather over the top …
Yeah I don’t know how to define it properly but I don’t need to learn new words if they don’t even teach the right meaning
Ai slop
That seems a pretty good definition of 'frugal' to me. To be excessively frugal would be miserly, tight-fisted or whatever.
There were a couple of definitions I did think were a bit off, e.g. 'zenith' and 'nihilism'. And one word where two answers seemed valid but I forget which.
Sometimes it gives one of several possible meanings but that's a valid choice.
In general I think it's a fun quiz - agreed with others though that the word selection brackets aren't ideal. It spends a lot of time on everyday vocabulary, then jumps straight into long words that someone made up one day as a joke.
The words I find most interesting are those that convey some subtle nuance, or describe some very specific thing - tools for old crafts, uncommon but genuinely used adjectives and the like. Very few of those appear.
"Frugal" most definitely does not mean "rather over the top" unless that is some new slang meaning I've never heard of.
You can look it up in a dictionary? See, e.g., https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=fruga...
That definition hinges on their definition for “economical” - adding a qualifier like “excessively economical” would’ve been good I think.
Seems like I’m the idiot here.
I had frugal stored as more than just economical.
Thanks for your comments :/
Frugal doesn't mean anything "excessive," it's not the same as a cheapskate or tightwad.
Being frugal just means allocating scarce resources in a way that provides most utility and value.
Seems like you don't know what frugal means at all!